Literary Dublin - Dublin - page 448

JAMES JOYCE
Foremost among Dublin writers is James Joyce, author of Ulysses, the greatest book of the 20th century - al-
though we've yet to meet five people who've actually finished it. Still, Dubliners are immensely proud of the
writer once castigated as a literary pornographer by locals and luminaries alike - even George Bernard Shaw dis-
missed him as vulgar. Joyce was so unappreciated that he left the city, never to reside in it again, though he con-
tinued to live here through his imagination and literature.
His Life
Born in Rathgar in 1882, the young Joyce had three short stories published in an Irish farmers' magazine under
the pen name Stephen Dedalus in 1904. The same year he fled town with the love of his life, Nora Barnacle
(when James' father heard her name he commented that she would surely stick to him). He spent most of the next
10 years in Trieste, now part of Italy, where he wrote prolifically but struggled to get published. His career was
further hampered by recurrent eye problems and he had 25 operations for glaucoma, cataracts and other condi-
tions.
The first major prose he finally had published was Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories set in the city,
including the three stories he had written in Ireland. Publishers began to take notice and his autobiographical A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) followed. In 1918 the US magazine Little Review started to publish
extracts from Ulysses, but notoriety was already pursuing his epic work and the censors prevented publication of
further episodes after 1920.
Passing through Paris on a rare visit to Dublin, he was persuaded by Ezra Pound to stay a while in the French
capital, and later said he 'came to Paris for a week and stayed 20 years'. It was a good move for the struggling
writer for, in 1922, he met Sylvia Beach of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co, who finally managed to put
Ulysses (1922) into print. The publicity of its earlier censorship ensured instant success.
Buoyed by the success of the inventive Ulysses , Joyce went for broke with Finnegans Wake (1939), 'set' in
the dreamscape of a Dublin publican. Perhaps not one to read at the airport, the topic is a daunting and often ob-
scure tome about eternal recurrence. It is even more complex than Ulysses and took the author 17 years to write.
In 1940 WWII drove the Joyce family back to Zürich, where the author died the following year.
Ulysses
Ulysses is the ultimate chronicle of the city in which Joyce once said he intended to 'give a picture of Dublin so
complete that if the city suddenly one day disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book'. It
is set here on 16 June, 1904 - the day of Joyce's first date with Nora Barnacle - and follows its characters as their
journeys around town parallel the voyage of Homer's Odyssey .
The experimental literary style makes it difficult to read, but there's much for even the slightly bemused reader
to relish. It ends with Molly Bloom's famous stream of consciousness discourse, a chapter of eight huge, unpunc-
tuated paragraphs. Because of its sexual explicitness, the topic was banned in the US and the UK until 1933 and
1937, respectively.
In testament to the topics enduring relevance and extraordinary innovation, it has inspired writers of every
generation since. Joyce admirers from around the world descend on Dublin every year on 16 June to celebrate
Bloomsday and retrace the steps of its central character, Leopold Bloom. It is a slightly gimmicky and touristy
phenomenon that appeals almost exclusively to Joyce fanatics and tourists, but it's plenty of fun and a great way
to lay the groundwork for actually reading the topic.